There is a feeling of the day after the party on the sites of the Paris 2024 Games. That moment, when the mind is still foggy, you have to put everything away, erase all traces of the evening. The Grand Palais, the Place de la Concorde or the stadium at the foot of the Eiffel Tower no longer resonate with the performances and the French fervor heard during the Olympic and Paralympic summer. Today, the noise of the screw-unscrewing machines and the metal stands, which battalions of handlers are busy dismantling, has taken over.
Read the story: Article reserved for our subscribers How Paris 2024 transformed the capital’s iconic locations into Olympic venues
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This will remain the case until the end of October on most of the iconic and ephemeral sites that dazzled so much during the competitions. “We need to be able to return them to Paris and to Parisians as quickly as possible.explained Edouard Donnelly, executive director of operations at the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) during a press briefing on Tuesday, September 10. We started with the furniture, lighting systems, cabling, etc. before tackling the heavier infrastructure. We dismantle the opposite of what we put together, so to speak.
The operations were launched the day after the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games on August 28 on the Place de la Concorde, where dizzying stands had been installed for urban sports during the Olympic fortnight. Since then, the western part of the square, where the Luxor obelisk stands, has been returned to traffic, with some work to connect the traffic lights.
Time is running out
The sectors of Les Invalides (archery), Champ-de-Mars (blind football and judo) and the Grand Palais (fencing and taekwondo) will have to wait a few more days, or even weeks, but all temporary installations used for the Games must have been removed by the end of October or the beginning of November at the latest, according to a well-established schedule. Because time is running out: the great nave of the Palais des Beaux-Arts must serve, from September 27, as a new setting for the fashion week shows.
The schedule is even tighter – but the restoration operations are easier – for the permanent sites rented by Cojop. The Arenas of Bercy, Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), Portes de Versailles and La Chapelle must resume their programming as soon as possible, as must the Stade de France, which is preparing to host the Mylène Farmer concert at the end of the month.
The sites that were only used for the Olympic Games have already removed all traces of the “enchanted interlude”: the banks of the Seine have been cleared of the tubular stands and temporary installations set up for the opening ceremony on July 26; the football stadiums, from Nantes to Marseille, have returned to their original function for the resumption of the Ligue 1 championship; the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines national golf course (Yvelines) reopened its doors just a few days after the end of the Olympic tournament; Teahupoo (Tahiti), Elancourt (Yvelines) and the Marseille marina (etc.) have also turned the page on the Games.
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